The artist of street litter.

"North Korea has released more than 3,000 of the trash balloons since May, many of which have reached the South after floating across the Demilitarized Zone...."

"They have landed on trees, farms and urban side streets, their payloads bursting and spilling out waste paper, used cloth, cigarette butts and compost​. On Wednesday, for the first time, some of them landed inside the sprawling compound in central Seoul that includes the office of President Yoon Suk Yeol... one of the most tightly guarded places in South Korea. Officials said they waited for the balloons to land before sending a chemical, biological and radiological response team to inspect their payloads, rather than blast them ​— and scatter their​ suspicious payloads ​— from the sky. The team found 'nothing dangerous or contaminating'...."

From "North Korean Trash Balloons Hit South Korean President’s Compound/Officials found nothing hazardous in the balloons’ payloads, as the North’s slow barrage of airborne garbage showed few signs of letting up" (NYT).

Why?

"Florida is at the forefront of a dizzying and contentious array of statewide bans..."

"... outlawing lab grown meat, certain books from school libraries and classrooms, and most abortions after six weeks. But the balloon ban is rare for garnering widespread bipartisan support.... The new legislation makes it clear that balloons can pose an environmental hazard, supporters say. It equates intentionally releasing a balloon filled with a gas lighter than air with littering...."

"Balloons Harm Wildlife. Florida Is Set to Ban Their Release/In an effort to curb microplastics and marine pollution, lawmakers in the Sunshine State voted overwhelmingly to make it illegal to intentionally let a balloon fly away" (NYT).

Of course, releasing a balloon is littering! How did people ever convince themselves that it wasn't? Well, they just didn't think about it, did they?

Side note: Did you spot the free-range "garnering" released into the wild?

"She and I discussed that her desire to stake out this kind of public position and join in public protests isn’t compatible with being a journalist at The Times..."

Said Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, quoted in "New York Times Writer Resigns After Signing Letter Protesting the Israel-Gaza War/The writer, Jazmine Hughes, who has won awards for her work, had signed another letter of protest this year" (NYT).

"I don’t trash-pick as often as I’d like to — usually when I’m faced with doing something far more unappealing..."

"... or whenever I need to work off some bad karma. It’s a terrific hobby for me, an anxious putterer with a holier-than-thou bent who writes better when my hands are occupied with something else. (I’m not alone — the humorist David Sedaris is a much more accomplished writer and trash picker than me.) When I do it, though, Bluetooth headphones in my ears and a weed gummy dissolving in my stomach, solicitousness and gratification ripple through me."

Writes Jazmine Hughes, in "The Joy of Picking Up Other People’s Trash/When my neighborhood changed around me, I decided to change it" (NYT).

The neighborhood is not named, but we're told it's in Brooklyn, and the change is gentrification — "turbocharged gentrification." Hughes looks around and sees herself as "the only Black person standing on the corner" while "gaggles of 20-somethings... roam the streets, presumably in search of eyebrows, which none of them seemed to have."

"We came to be and then ran amok. And because we’re smart enough, we should know enough to end it. People mention music and art and literature and the great things that we have done..."

"... it’s funny they don’t ever mention the bad things we’ve done. I don’t think the whales will miss our songs."

Said Les Knight, quoted in "Earth Now Has 8 Billion Humans. This Man Wishes There Were None. For the sake of the planet, Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, has spent decades pushing one message: 'May we live long and die out'" (NYT).

"On Monday, a partially eaten full turkey at one abandoned site had two hypodermic needles sticking from it and needles were easy to spot elsewhere."

"'It’s a public health concern... We don’t want needles being covered up by the snow. We are trying to get ahead of the weather.'"

From "Madison breaking up homeless encampment at Reindahl Park" (Wisconsin State Journal).

Photographing Thanksgiving litter at sunrise.

"Seems like this advice, which will provide essentially no meaningful benefits to the world, is designed to achieve an exquisite balance..."

"... keep travelling but feel more virtuous by tweaking your usual routines with tiny sacrifices, while retaining some of the guilt and shame that appears necessary to be a genuine 'woke' person."

That's the top-rated comment on "How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?/And what can you do about it?" by Seth Kugel (in the NYT).

First, I highly recommend clicking through so you can see the fantastic illustration by Tim Enthoven (I see I recommended him before, here).

Now, to the text. Kugel is a travel writer. And the NYT makes money selling travel to its readers. The problem of air travel and carbon emissions is a huge conflict of interest for them, and it's painful or humorous to watch them try to writhe into a nonridiculous position.

So, O.K. How bad should we really feel? Well, first of all, no self-flagellation required for that week in Italy. It is true that your round-trip flight is probably the biggest single contributor to your carbon footprint this year (unless you moved from a studio apartment to a mansion or quit your job for the Nature Conservancy to become a coal lobbyist). But shame is the wrong emotion....

Why is shame the "wrong" emotion? And why does the text switch from "guilt" to "shame"? I thought the distinction was important! It's not even discussed. And the text goes on to suggest that the reason "shame" is "wrong" is because shaming isn't an effective way to get people to change what they are doing. It's not? Why not? Is that scientifically proven fact? You know, where you have the problem of people not wanting to believe the science about climate change, you ought to adhere closely to science, and yet you have nothing scientific about shaming (or guilt, which you unscientifically merge)!

It seems to me that shaming is often quite effective.

Litter.

After writing the last post and creating a new tag "littering," I launched into the enterprise of adding the tag retrospectively, through the whole 15-year archive of this blog. Soon enough, I saw I was creating a parallel tag. There already was a tag "litter," so I had to work to get rid of the new tag.

I don't want my blog littered with duplicative tags. So the tag — the good old tag — is "litter."

I hadn't used it consistently, since I'd forgotten I had it. Just now, I added it to a few old things, including that post about Professor Amy Wax 2 days ago, which included The New Yorker's paraphrase of her saying "that white people litter less than people of color."

What Wax actually said was that French children "wouldn’t dream of creating a ruckus, just like they wouldn’t dream of littering." Then the New Yorker interviewer, Isaac Chotiner, prodded her with the question "So white French kids wouldn’t dream of littering, you mean?" She answered in an indirect way that reinforced her position that she's talking about culture:

Well, certainly, in Germany, I don’t think they would. I’ve seen them being upbraided on the street for doing that by other people. I just think there are differences in behavior that track culture, that track nationality. They’re not perfect. There’s a range. If you want to deny that they exist, you know.... [Laughs.]

She didn't agree with the absurd idea that the tendency to litter is inborn and race-based! I remember back in the 1950s, I saw litter all along the roadways where I lived (in Delaware, amongst white people). I felt really bad about it, and it seemed hopeless. But Americans decided to turn things around and we did. And look at England. The American humorist David Sedaris frequently writes about his public-service work picking up litter near his home in England.

From "Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls":

I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “fuck you”?

So click on the "litter" tag. There's some good stuff in there, including litter at the Wisconsin protests (and discussion of the folk belief that left wingers litter and right wingers leave a place cleaner than they found it), litter on Mount Everest, the old Arlo Guthrie song line "What were you arrested for?," the "Garden Spicer" project, and the concept of "hipster litter."

The etymology of "litter" is bed-related. "Lit" is the French word for bed. It's from a bed that you get to the sort of "litter" that you carry a person on...

... and the idea of a "litter" of animals. Picture the scraps of plant material that would be the animals' bed.

From there you get the plant "litter" — the bits of fallen leaves you can use as mulch or that might be involved in Finnish forest-raking. Once you see that, it's easy to see how "litter" became "Odds and ends, fragments and leavings lying about, rubbish; a state of confusion or untidiness; a disorderly accumulation of things lying about" (OED). That meaning emerged in the 18th century.

The verb "litter" begins with the idea of making a bed for an animal. By the 18th century, it could also mean "To cover as with litter, to strew with objects scattered in disorder." The oldest use with that meaning comes from Jonathan Swift in 1726:  "They found, The Room with Volumes litter'd round." Later, there's Charles Dickens, also talking about written material as litter: "A dingy room lined with books and littered with papers" ("A Tale of Two Cities, 1859). Indoor litter. Clutter. And, notably, books.

Today's digression got started with the discussion (in the previous post) of a comics artist depositing tiny scraps of writing around town. So I've cycled 'round to where I began. Literary litter. And oh, the scraps of writing I've strewn on this blog for 15 years! But there's no paper, no substance at all. Am I littering? Am I literary?

And no, "litter" and "literature" do not share an etymology. The "lit" in literature comes from a line that had another "t." The French is "littérature." It's not like the French "lit" for bed. Think of "letter."

Now, get moving...

"Gharib often forces herself to make a zine in five minutes, and she used that same approach when creating chapters for her book."

“The challenge and the beauty of the [comics and zines] format is practicing extreme restraint,” she said. “I had to condense down what I was trying to say in a set of words and meaningful images.'... You’re busy. We get it. But you can use small pockets of time to create. Gharib, for example, molded omelets and other foods out of leftover clay during work meetings. “If I don’t have any art materials and I get bored, I try to interact with whatever I have on me in the space I am in,” she said. “Sometimes I pick flowers and leave them places, or tear tiny bits of receipts or trash in my purse and write tiny messages on them and leave them around the city for people to find."

I was reading "How to Draw Yourself Out of a Creative Funk/Malaka Gharib, the author of the coming-of-age graphic memoir 'I Was Their American Dream,' shares her tips" (NYT) on my iPhone, where the Instagram images didn't display. I made a mental note to write a blog post titled something like "Littering?! The NYT endorses littering?" But this morning I'm on my desktop and I'm seeing the images and — is it just Morning Me versus Late-Night Me? — I'm presenting the Times text uncritically and clicking "Follow" at Instagram and thinking this littering is like the small category of graffiti that I'm happy to see.

View this post on Instagram

#5minutezine

A post shared by malaka 🥀 gharib (@malakagharib) on Jun 3, 2019 at 1:37pm PDT

"When we first spoke, on the phone, Wax explained that she was wary of the media, which she claimed has sometimes misquoted her and has frequently taken her comments out of context."

"Therefore, she was going to record the formal interview. She also said that she planned to occasionally adopt the role of interrogator and ask me questions, such as why some countries were 'shithole countries.' During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Wax expounded on her beliefs that people of Western origin are more scrupulous, empirical, and orderly than people of non-Western origin, and that women are less intellectual than men. She described these views as the outcome of rigorous and realistic thinking, while offering evidence that ranged from two studies by a eugenicist to personal anecdotes, several of which concerned her conviction that white people litter less than people of color."

Writes Isaac Chotiner, in his introduction to his interview with Amy Wax, "A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again" (The New Yorker). Yikes. It sounds like she was right to be wary, but she did the interview. I haven't read the transcript yet. I'll update when I have.

UPDATE: The boldface is Chotiner, the rest Wax:

My reading of this was that you are not only embracing cultural-distance nationalism but saying it may, in fact, be necessary to save the country. Is that correct?

Well that’s a little bit of an overheated way of saying it....

Because it's there.

That's my answer to the comment on my post disapproving of a gigantic New York Times article about retrieving the corpses of 2 people who attempted to climb Mount Everest.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said:

Ann, if you don't want to read a particular article, don't. Even when starved for anything at all to read, I've never read every word of the NYT. I read the pieces on classical music and skip the ones on rock and hip-hop, but I don't complain that the latter are there.

That's just not how I look at the NYT. When the New York Times — it was the New York Times — asked George Leigh Mallory, "Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?," he famously answered "Because it's there":

Now, you might say, Althouse, that's a terrible analogy. Mallory didn't complain about the existence of the mountain, he climbed it. And you didn't read the article about whose existence you complained.

But the ongoing operation that is the NYT is Mount Everest. Climbing it is blogging it. To blog it is to continually critique it, from my individual point of view. For me to ignore the NYT articles that bother me and to simply move on to things I like and can read without feeling any annoyance or strain, would be like telling Mallory he should take a pleasant hike in the foothills.

ADDED: I thought I was creating the tag "Mount Everest" for this post, but in fact, I'd had the Mount Everest tag for a long time and forgotten about it. But now I've gone back and made sure it's on all the posts. There are 23 of them. It's a topic I've followed for a long time. There are posts about the money, the dying, the litter, etc., and repetitions of that great quote from "My Dinner with Andre," but I just want to highlight "How to know everything you need to know":

I overheard this snippet of conversation today, as I was walking down State Street here in Madison, Wisconsin. 2 college-age guys, one in shorts. (The temperature is in the 20s.)

"Where's Mount Everest?"

"Seattle?"

"Did you say Seattle?!"

"Uhh..."

"I think it's in India somewhere."

"I don't care."

Now, there's wisdom in this ignorance. Is there not? As long as you don't care about whatever it is you don't know, you've got perfect intellectual equilibrium. You know everything you need to know. Unshakable wisdom. Sublime.

At the Littering Café...

... you can drop (or pick up) whatever you like.

That's just a shred of litter I saw on the ground and felt moved to stoop over and photograph.

Is that too profound to preclude my reminding you to shop at Amazon through the Althouse portal?

I searched for God at Amazon and found "God: A Human History," "God and Donald Trump," and Zeus Greek God Holding Thunderbolt Statue with Eagle.

"He said, 'What were you arrested for, kid?' And I said, 'Littering.'"

A line from an old song crosses my mind as I read this story in the Naperville Sun:

William V. Winnie, 67, of the 1100 block of Greensfield Drive, was charged Dec. 2 with obscenity, disorderly conduct and littering after he was arrested earlier this month in Pratt’s Wayne Woods near the village of Wayne, according to court and DuPage County Forest Preserve District police reports....

Police say they had received reports dating back to October from people who had noted seeing the underwear... near a bridge along the path in the preserve....

According to the report, Winnie said he would routinely find underwear hanging from the trees along the Prairie Path, which he would take home, place in the plastic bags and then leave them at the bridge. Winnie reported leaving 15 to 20 pairs over the previous year.

“He described his actions as an experiment and said he wanted to see where it would go,” the report said....

Sounds like an art project. He keeps finding underpants. Somebody else is hanging up underpants on various trees. He seems to be reframing the situation in a more orderly way, bagging the evidence and putting it all in the same place. I'm as concerned about littering as the next person, but does this old man really deserve to have his photo, name, and (approximate) address printed in the paper?

We're told that some of panties were "accompanied by salacious photos," but that Winnie said he didn't know how that got in the bag.

You may be thinking his explanation makes no sense: What "experiment"? Where could it "go"?

I don't get it. 

Like the Underpants Gnomes, he did Phase 1, Collect underpants. Unlike the gnomes — whose Phase 2 was just "?" — Winnie's Phase 2 was: Package and redistribute underpants. But that doesn't get you to Phase 3: Profit. Winnie had "?" as Phase 3, and the police answered the question. Get arrested for littering.

I am surprised/not surprised to see the uncomplicated promotion in The Washington Post of positioning a photograph of the top of the head of Sean Spicer to make it appear that he is hiding in shrubbery.

This meme — a sort of comic protest art — developed after Spicer was seen standing between 2 tall hedges and talking to reporters, giving something of an impression that he was hiding in the bushes. Now, there's a website — linked in WaPo — where you can download the photograph...

“Presenting the ‘Garden Spicer,'” Kadonaga said in her Facebook post Thursday. “Now you too can have the White House press secretary in — or rather, “among”* — the bushes in your yard. And hey, if you’re concerned that when exposed to the outdoors, the image will run … no worries, that’s exactly what Sean Spicer does, so it’s totally authentic!”...

Since then, Spicer’s face has been popping up in gardens around the world — in the District of Columbia, California, even New Zealand. Spicer has been spotted hiding in household planters, in shrubs outside the Watergate Hotel, and even in Mother’s Day bouquets of flowers....

This seems to be one of those times when people think that because their heart is in the right place — here, hating Trump — that whatever they do will work as they intended — such as, here, giving the good people who hate Trump an outlet to express and experience their contempt for Trump. But they don't think it through. They don't think of the other values — values they as good people also treasure — that come into play. Specifically, in this case, environmentalism and feminism.

1. Environmentalism. If you leave these paper-on-cardboard things in bushes, you are littering. But perhaps you only put the head there long enough to take a photo to upload to social media. There is still the more spiritual level of environmentalism, the appropriation of plant life for human purposes that have nothing to do with the plant's meaning unto itself. It's one thing to locate a shrub so that its natural beauty is close to you where you can see and admire it, quite another to impose on the plant's inherent dignity, to use it as a symbol of human surreptitiousness and guilt.

2. Feminism. You have forgotten the fear of violence that limits the freedom of women to move freely in this world! Creating the impression of a man hiding in the bushes is akin to chalking swastikas on the sidewalk or hanging nooses on trees. Worse, really, because passersby might from a distance think an attacker really is right there, ready to strike. Let's remember the "Sleepwalker" statue that caused such a disturbance at Wellesley college in 2014:

The sculpture is out in the open where it can be seen from a distance and it really does look like a strange man stumbling about in his underwear.



Whether you're afraid of "him" or simply think he has a problem... you're drawn into a real emotional response before you realize it is art.... But — ha ha — it's only a statue. You're silly. You were afraid of a statue. So it's an unsettling prank. Why? Is that good art? It has appropriated your peace of mind, your comfort in a public space, for what?

Safety in public spaces is a feminist issue. And forgetting that whenever you have some other purpose in mind is a feminist problem.

Salvaging the litter of the Women's March...

... preserving it as history.

Archival projects aren’t typically spontaneous, but the material was available for only a short window, and the group had to act quickly, [said  Dietmar Offenhuber, an assistant professor of art and design and public policy].

Though many of the signs were funny and creative, said Alessandra Renzi, assistant professor in emergent media, the archive isn’t just about displaying the clever quips, but about understanding the women’s movement and sentiment around the march, she said. "It was one very large mobilization in a country that no longer has very large mobilizations."...

The signs illustrate concern and demands for Mr. Trump’s administration without getting lost in a social-media feed. As activism and democratic movements live increasingly online, physical signs are a rarity....

It's good to preserve protest signs. Not all of them, of course, but this was an example of abandoned signs that had fallen into the category of things people regard as trash and a quick decision to preserve the whole lot. In the end, only the best will be selected and preserved, though I assume the very best — like the one John photographed here — were not abandoned on the street in the first place.

And I didn't know you could be an "emergent media" professor. Is that just another way to say new media?

"When people told him it was a deathtrap, he would laugh. In Derick's mind he was creating this amazing art space..."

"... and everything going on there was the most amazing thing ever."

Said one friend of the captain of the so-called Ghost Ship, where at least 33 people died in a fire Friday night. The man, who sublet space in the rented warehouse, is Derick Ion Almena, who reacted to the fire with a Facebook post that is the most perverse display of sensitivity I have ever seen:

Confirmed. Everything I worked so hard for is gone. Blessed that my children and Micah were at a hotel and safe and sound…it's as if I have awoken from a dream filled with opulence and hope… to be standing now in poverty of self worth.

Here's a description of Almena's art space:

Visitors have described a squalid scene where cat faeces and used condoms litter the limited floor space, junk and 'art' is piled high in every room, nails protrude from stairs made out of old pallets, brick work crumbles in the walls and drug use rife among the party goers who came and went.

The photo of the place (from before the fire) looks like a perfect stage set for a tragicomedy about aging hippies:



In the upper right corner is a spider plush toy the size of a lamp shade. To the left is a sad, bowed-head figure that reminds me of the No Face character in the movie "Spirited Away."

Spirited away, in a vehicle called Ghost Ship.

ADDED:

So I was down there and I was having trouble finding the exit... the lower level is like a fucking maze. The stair room had three different exits and only one would have been the way to outside. Horrifying....

Some dude who had already gotten out stood right by the exit with all the billowing smoke and was repeatedly yelling "this is the exit" "exit." I can say without a doubt that that dude saved my life. If he wasn't there yelling I would have never found the exit and I probably would have died.

AND: From the comments at that "ADDED" link:

On the subway in St. Petersburg, "there is no trash, no litter, no graffiti. It is clean down there."

"Remarkably tidy for a nation that doesn't have the reputation for being pristine. And no, I did not see a cleaning squad attending to human slovenliness. I saw an occasional (but rare) guard, that's all," writes my colleague Nina, with excellent photographs.

And I saw a populace that is proud. Too proud to deface what is regarded as uniquely grand, uniquely theirs.

Which brings me to the final point: the metro was built in the years just before and after the death of Stalin. The stations are a work of art. Soviet art. There isn't a better place to come face to face with it than at the metro stations.

Times have changed since the days of Lenin or Stalin. We're back to Russia now, as opposed to the Soviet Union. And Saint Petersburg, as opposed to Leningrad. But although the city name has changed and the commercial face of Russia has surely changed too, moving further and further from the post-revolution communist rhetoric of its leaders, here -- unlike in Poland [where Nina grew up] -- the monuments to those leaders have, for the most part remained in place...

Perhaps this is true to some extent in most countries: we, too, have trouble letting go of glorified images of generals and leaders whose period of governance did not exactly embrace all the values we claim to hold dear. But in Poland, the erasure of a communist past has proceeded rapidly following the return to market capitalism. The changing of Warsaw street names is a prime example of this. Not so here....

"Woman Slaps Period Pads All Over Her Town For A Very Important Reason."

A HuffPostWomen headline.

1. I'm telling you — and I've told you before — the job of cranking out one "feminist" post after another is not easy. And isn't it just what you'd expect in a phallocracy? — that they'd relegate this job to women. How I pity the slaving female scribes of HuffPostWomen.

2. Great name, by the way: Elonë Kastratia.

3. Is "period pads" really an expression? Never heard it, perhaps because I've sojourned scantily in Europe.

4. Here's a better story about sanitary napkins: "How do you cut the school dropout rate for girls in a remote pocket of Uganda? And how do you create jobs for village women? The answer to both questions: sanitary pads. The story begins in 2009, when 26-year-old Sophia Klumpp and her husband-to-be Paul Grinvalds – she's from the U.S., he's from Canada — began working for a nonprofit group in a rural village in Uganda. Klumpp saw that many of the teenagers in school used threadbare rags or tufts of mattress stuffing as sanitary pads. The embarrassment and the fear of an accident kept many of them away from school for the four or five days of their period each month...."

5. Great name, Klumpp. Good work. Much better than protest-littering in Europe.